“We told him you said hello,” Cole said, laughing, but he didn’t sound amused. “How old is that kid?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t know him. As I told you.”

We listened to the waves, the small splashes on the sand. Then a larger splash, as if a seal had surfaced and crashed back under the water.

“I’m surprised you’re still up,” Lucas said. “I’m going to bed.”

“Let’s stay up,” Cole said quietly to me. “I have something to tell you.”

We listened to Lucas climb the stairs, listened to water rushing through the pipes—a soft, high-pitched keening—as Lucas brushed his teeth. What was Cole going to tell me? Was it about my mother? He seemed in no hurry to speak. He leaned back and stared straight into the darkness on the other side of the porch. His breathing was quiet and even.

“I have something to tell you, too,” I said.

He reached down and touched my leg, just below the knee, below the ragged hem of my shorts. My legs were brown and scratched, dotted with mosquito bites. Cole ran two fingers from my knee to my ankle. My heart seemed to beat everywhere all at once, in my fingertips, my skull. I felt dizzy.

“You’re not a child,” Cole said. “That’s what you don’t realize. You’re a woman. And you’re beautiful.”

This was not how I’d expected this conversation to go. I stood up, my heart racing, and he held out a hand to stop me. “You’re wasting your time with that kid in the information booth in Carson Cove. You’re wasting your time with Ed Frank.” His voice slowed, and he enunciated every word. “You,” he said, “have so much more to give than Ed Frank could ever ask you for. You have things to give that he doesn’t even know exist.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I said. My heartbeat filled my ears. The wailing of water started in the pipes again.

He said, “I thought maybe no one had ever told you.”

I swallowed. “No one has,” I said.

Chapter 11

11

When we were thirteen, Lucas made friends with a summer girl named Katrina. Or rather, she made friends with him. Lucas didn’t make friends, but if someone bossed him skillfully enough, he’d do what they said. We’d known Katrina for years; she came every summer, but she was a year older and while we were still digging for baby clams in the black sand around the rocks or making drip castles on the sandbar, she was enisled on the clean blue of her beach towel in a pink bikini.

When we were thirteen, she developed an interest in Lucas and started toting him around like a beach bag.

“Do you like her?” I’d asked Lucas that summer.

“She’s nice to me,” he said, although he looked terrified.